Can I use Trello as a resource board for families in our parish with the FREE account version?

[Denise Brennan]

I work at a nonprofit and love to organizational structure of Trello and see it as a way to post information and resources to families instead of using a website, blog, or sending by frequent emails.

I don't plan to use it as a workspace so much as a  resource board. My question is whether I can maintain this on the free account version? From doing a bit of reading, it seems that I may be able to invite families as guests to a particular board. From sharing that board, they can then access documents, videos, calendars, etc... without needing a pro version account. Does this seem feasible?

[Brittany Joiner · Accepted solution]

@Denise Brennan welcome to the community! You absolutely can do this on the free plan. So, there's a couple ways you can go about it. Here's an example of one that i made about resources for developers. 

As far as how you go about it, it depends if you want the information to be public or invite-only. For instance, if you're fine with it being public (like a website or blog), then just create a public Trello board, and the link will be accessible and content viewable by anyone you send it to. They won't even need to create a Trello account! They can view the cards, open them, click links in them, etc. They just wont be able to comment on the cards, move them, edit them, etc. (Which I assume is probably what you want.)

If you want the information to be private or accessible by invite only, it gets a little more tricky, but you can definitely still do it with the free plan, you just wouldn't be able to control access of the guests. For instance, you could create a private board with all the resources, and invite as many people as you want to it (I don't think there's any limit), but they would need to have a Trello account to access the content, and on the free plan you can't set "Observer" roles which would limit their access to only commenting. So once you invited someone to the board, they could edit the cards, move them, archive them, etc. 

So unless it's extremely sensitive information, I'd go for the first option - public board that you share the link to! 

[Denise Brennan]

I appreciate you taking the time to respond and so fully. Very helpful. One point of clarification that remains: if the board is made public, when users access the content (click to open videos, say) does that count as command runs? The big difference between pricing seems to be these command runs and the terminology is confusing regarding how users interact and what these interactions are counted as. 

The other though I had was to invite the families as a guest to this one board. But it sounds like a big difference is that they would have to have an account. It would be great if they did not have to have an account and could just access the board regularly for the resources. I do not want them to post or make changes to the content anyway.

Again, I thank you for your time and sharing of Trello knowledge.

[Brittany Joiner]

@Denise Brennan great question! so command runs is related only to automation - not at all to opening and clicking links on the board! so you will be totally unlimited in the amount of interactions people can have with opening cards, clicking links in them, etc. 

And yep - it sounds like your other thought is basically that second option i mentioned. You could do that, but as you pointed out - that would require them to have an account, and then they'd be able to make edits. So I wouldn't recommend doing that. The only reason you'd want to is there's very sensitive information that you only want certain people to access. But even then honestly, it's not as easy as it sounds for random people to find a public board. Yes, technically it's indexed by google and can appear, but as one who has spent a lot of my time in marketing and SEO, it's very difficult to make that happen for relevant keywords 😂, so even if its public, most people still wont find that board unless you send them the link to it.

Happy to help! Let me know if you have any more questions!

[Denise Brennan]

Thank you for the additional information and especially for sharing your time. A true service to others and it helped me tremendously to have some affirmation as I navigated the intense amount of information needed to make the best decisions for our organization. I thought about someone randomly finding the board and determined that there wouldn't be anything proprietary or anything that would reveal vulnerabilities of users so there shouldn't be any harm, and, if someone random found the information on the board to be useful, I'd welcome them using it. Thanks again for your input. 

[Brittany Joiner]

Absolutely! Happy to help!